Stories from Heraklion - A walk at the Aquarium

About a week has passed since my last post about my recent trip to Heraklion and for this week's episode, I decided to take you with me on the visit I did to the aquarium that is located near Heraklion, more specifically found in the area of the former American Base in Gournes, 14km from the city of Heraklion. It was truly a unique experience that I would recommend to everyone to get there if they found themselves at Crete and especially near the Cretaquarium. Before we are going to proceed with the very interesting stuff that we are going to see today I would like to share with you that probably I am going to do one more part which is going to be the final about Heraklion and it's going to be very interesting because I would like to cover the Archaeological Museums that I visited there and especially the ancient city of Knossos. So stick around because more great stuff are coming in the near future! Let's explore now the amazing marine life in this majestical place!

Before we are going to begin watching the animals that live here, I would like to give you a taste of how the whole experience was and more specifically show you the way we navigated inside the aquarium. So I found a pretty cool layout of the Cretaquarium that shows every room and each space inside the aquarium. So the journey begins walking left from the counter and you pretty much go through every section (in each section is displayed a different aspect of the marine life of the Mediterranean) and you finally get out from the other end behind the counter.

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Marine Life

The first thing that we are going to see is the famous sea anemones which took their names from the terrestrial flower anemones because of their colors. It was a really beautiful thing to watch and it may not be as interesting as the other exhibits but the colors were really eye-catching.

This is the famous Stingray aka Dasyatis Pastinaca and I was pretty surprised when I saw his bottom part because it kinda looks like a creepy face 😂 Some more details is that he prefers to cover up his body in the sand and go in full predator mode but when I was there it was probably fed up because it was swimming cheerful not giving a damn. Pretty awesome creature.

Well, when we are talking about the definition of predators we must mention the biggest predator on the sea, and of course, I am talking about Sand Tiger Shark aka Eugomphodus Taurus. I saw there that it can reach 3 meters in length and 150kg in weight but I am not completely sure that this one was so big. The main issue was that the glass was pretty thick as you probably already know and I am not sure about the actual size of the majority of the animals that I saw in the aquarium. One last thing that I noticed was that If you look closer at the middle image you would see that his "nose" has some scratches I was suspecting that it could be because he would feel contained in this area but I am not sure that this is the case tbh. In any case, it was a pretty powerful animal and you could feel his energy only by his presence.

That fish was one of the most awesome-looking fishes in the aquarium and I am not completely sure about his name but I believe that it was a lionfish. One of the most interesting things that I found when I was looking to identify it was the fact that these species were invasive on the Mediterranean.